Barry Greenstein, Antonio Esfandiari Amongst HSP7 Participants

Published on 2010-12-16 03:40:00

There has been a great deal of speculation as to which players would be participating in the seventh season of "High Stakes Poker", which is filming at the Bellagio from Wednesday (today) through Friday.

The biggest question - would Full Tilt Poker be allowing their pros to play?

The answer appears to be "no", as names like Phil Ivey, Tom "durrrr" Dwan and Patrik Antonius were nowhere to be seen on the first day of taping.

In addition, Daniel Negreanu, who has been an integral part of the first six seasons of the show, was also unable to play due to work commitments (he is filming a commercial).

So who played on Day 1 of the tapings? Let's look to Twitter for the answers:

Barry Greenstein - "Getting ready to film High Stakes Poker at Bellagio. They gave me old chips from the cage due to a recent robbery!"

Jonathan Duhamel - "@TheGrinder44 Some shooting for PStars and then high stakes poker!"

Andrew Robl - "On set for high stakes poker. Going to be quite a season!"

Jason Mercier - "Off to Vegas today ... Goin to try my luck again at season 7 of high stakes poker"

In addition, Phil "OMGClayAiken" Galfond, David "Viffer" Peat, Phil Laak and Scotty Nguyen are all expected to participate as well.

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This line-up is definitely a step down from last year's stacked roster of players (no offense intended to this year's participants, but I'm sure that most everyone would agree with this statement). It will be interesting to see how this season's ratings end up comparing to Season 6.